Why everyone hates microhousing

This is an ongoing argument in Northern Virginia (which is not quite
as expensive as SF / Seattle / NYC, but probably only one cost tier
below that) over micro-housing, typically in the form of backyard
apartments and the subdivision of single-family homes into boarding
houses, and the major arguments are basically the same issues that
apply to all “just build more housing, stupid” proposals.

Basically, if you suddenly build a lot more housing, you’d start to
strain the infrastructure of the community in other ways. That strain
is really, really unpleasant to other people who share the
infrastructure, and so current residents – who are often already
feeling like things are strained and getting worse over time – would
rather avoid making things worse. The easiest way to avoid making
things worse is just to control the number of residents, and the
easiest way to do that is to control the amount of housing: If you
don’t live here, you’re probably not using the infrastructure. QED.

In many ways, building more housing is the easiest problem to solve
when it comes to urban infrastructure. Providing a heated place out
of the rain just isn’t that hard, compared to (say) transportation or
schools or figuring out economically sustainable economic balance.

Existing residents are probably (and reasonably) suspicious that once
a bunch of tiny apartments are air-dropped in, and then a bunch of
people move in to fill them up, that there won’t be any solution to
any of the knock-on problems that will inevitably result – parking,
traffic, school overcrowding, tax-base changes, stress to physical
infrastructure like gas/water/sewer/electric systems – until those
systems become untenably broken. I mean, I can’t speak to Seattle,
but those things are already an increasingly-severe problem today,
with the current number of residents, in my area, and people don’t
have much faith in government’s ability to fix them; so the idea that
the situation will be improved once everyone installs a couple of
backyard apartments is ridiculous. (And then there are questions
like: how are these backyard apartments going to be taxed? Are people
who move in really going to pay more in taxes than they consume in
services and infrastructure impact, or is this going to externalize
costs via taxes on everyone else? There’s no clear answer to these
questions, and people are reluctant to become the test case.)

If you want more housing, you need more infrastructure. If you want
more infrastructure, either you need a different funding model or you
need better government and more trust in that government. Our
government is largely (perceived to be) broken, and public
infrastructure is (perceived to be) broken or breaking, and so the
unsurprising result is that nobody wants to build more housing and add
more strain to a system that’s well beyond its design capacity anyway.

That’s why there’s so much opposition to new housing construction,
particularly to ideas that look just at ways to provide more housing
without doing anything else. You’re always going to get a lot of
opposition to “just build housing” proposals unless they’re part of a
compelling plan to actually build a community around that new housing.